A Canadian court today struck down a bequest valued at about $220,000 that was left by a citizen of that country to the National Alliance (NA), a neo-Nazi group based in the United States that has long promoted violence against minorities. The presiding judge found that the bequest violated Canadian law and public policy.

“The evidence before this court convinces me that in the case of the NA the purpose for which it exists is to promote white supremacy through the dissemination of propaganda which incites hatred of various identifiable groups which they deem to be non-white and therefore unworthy,” wrote Justice William T. Grant of St. John, New Brunswick, in a 44-page ruling (PDF). “Those purposes and the means they advocate to achieve them are criminal in Canada and that is what makes this request so repugnant.”

NA Chairman Erich Gliebe

The judge permanently enjoined any transfer of funds or other parts of the estate, which includes a collection of ancient Greek and Roman coins, to the NA. Instead, he ordered it distributed to the brother and sister of Harry Robert McCorkill, a longtime Canadian NA member who died in 2004. McCorkill’s sister, Isabelle Rose McCorkill, initially challenged the bequest, and she was later joined by two Jewish human rights groups in Canada as well as the provincial attorney general.

The judge brushed aside claims by NA representatives and supporters that the group had been unfairly tarred in affidavits from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and others that quoted the group’s foundational documents as well as other written and spoken materials produced by its officials. “All of these publications can only be described as racist, white supremacist and hate-inspired,” the judge wrote.

“They are disgusting, repugnant and revolting.”

The court decision comes at a time when the NA, once the dominant hate group in America, is struggling to survive. It has gone from an organization that once brought in about $1 million a year and had some 1,400 dues-paying members to a group that is nearly bankrupt and has only a smattering of supporters left. The group’s current leader is trying to sell off much of its West Virginia headquarters compound to raise money, and a faction led by the brother of the group’s late founder has sued it in civil court in an attempt to regain control of the organization. The loss of the bequest could help finally destroy the remnants of the once-storied NA. ( continue to full post… )

A Florida man who fired more than 50 rounds at police officers and now is charged with 10 counts of attempted murder had neo-Nazi literature and a stockpile of firearms and ammunition in his home, authorities say.

No officers were injured during last weekend’s SWAT encounter that began when they went to a home near Williston, Fla., looking for Dustin Harold Heathman, who had been sought on multiple arrest warrants.

As SWAT officers approached the home on Sunday, a woman inside took off running and Heathman opened fire, hitting a SWAT vehicle several times, WESH-TV in Orlando reported.

Heathman then turned his automatic weapon toward other SWAT officers who were approaching the home, according to the news report.

During an exchange of gunfire, Heathman was hit with glass fragments, but his injuries weren’t life-threatening, authorities said. After making antigovenment statements and suggesting he wanted to die, he was booked into the Marion County Jail.

Investigators have not released the list of items seized during a search of the home, but confirmed to Hatewatch today that neo-Nazi and white supremacist items were found, along with a cache of weapons and ammunition.

“We don’t know at this point exactly what his affiliations were,” Capt. James Pogue, the department’s public information chief, said today when reached for comment.

After his arrest, Marion County sheriff’s officials said Heathman reportedly made suicidal comments and he expressed antigovernment views similar to those of a sovereign citizen.

“His statement was that he was anti-government,” Marion County Major Tommy Bibb told WJCB-TV in Ocala.

“He did not want to let anyone come and arrest him,” Bibb told the television station. “His initial [plan] was to shoot as many officers as he could and then die by suicide by cop.”

Public records show Heathman has convictions in Palm Beach, Fla., for robbery, burglary, possessing a destructive device, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, attempting to elude officers and motor vehicle theft.

As a felon, he wouldn’t have been able to legally possess firearms. Federal authorities now are considering whether to file federal firearms charges in addition to the state attempted murder charges.

An Arkansas school district has accepted the resignation of a high school social studies teacher whose online racist comments and history of neo-Nazi activism were disclosed last month by Hatewatch.

Philip Holthoff, 53, taught at Star City High School in central Arkansas until he resigned abruptly following an investigation of his white supremacist activities, district superintendent Richard Montgomery told KTHV-TV in Little Rock today.

The school district has said nothing else publicly about its investigation or the teacher’s termination, and Holthoff has not commented publicly. It’s highly likely that he resigned after learning he was about to be fired.

Holthoff was placed on administrative leave after Hatewatch reported on April 24 that the high school teacher – using the screen name “David_Lee_Saxon” – had posted more than 400 racist comments on the Stormfront site.

What’s more, Holthoff had a long pedigree in neo-Nazi circles and was a significant financial contributor – a “sustaining member” – of Stormfront, the largest hate site on the Internet whose extremist users have murdered nearly 100 people.

The Star City School District has not disclosed what kind of background check – if any – they performed before hiring Holthoff, whose racist activism goes back 35 years. Records show he joined the neo-Nazi National Alliance in May 1980 at the age of 19, where he was given membership number A3148. Records also show Holthoff joined National Vanguard in May 2005 as member #V0547, and he is listed as a “lifetime” member of White Revolution.

In the past decade, while teaching young people at Star City High, Holthoff authored more than 400 posts on Stormfront, frequently making crude, anti-black comments.

“I teach high school and you would be amazed at some of the wild rumors Negro students believe,” Holthoff wrote in 2008.

In a 2009 post, Holthoff wrote: “I teach social studies in a public high school and I am racially conscious!” Later, following up on that topic, he wrote: “You don’t know chaos until you have seen Negro students going wild in the halls after the [2008] election screaming: OBAMA…OBAMA!!!”

In a post last year, Holthoff described his high school’s commencement ceremonies and complained about “that odor” of African Americans. “Its [sic] graduation time. I always get a kick out of how white administrators beg and plead for people to behave during the ceremonies. Black parents are the worse. The entire race must have ADD. Halfway into the ceremony they scream, shout, blow air guns and dance in the aisle when their child’s name is called. And that odor get in your clothes to! [sic]”

He applauded the often-expressed racist fantasy of rounding up “race traitors after the revolution,” Hatewatch reported last month. Just earlier this year he expressed the hope that a “top secret group” of white supremacists would “bring to justice” those “traitors” who promote interracial activities like the Super Bowl. ( continue to full post… )

After his arrest for a racially motivated rape and killing spree committed the day after Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, white supremacist Keith Luke told police he had planned to end his rampage by killing himself.

It took Luke five years behind bars, Obama’s second inauguration, and at least one other suicide attempt, but the plan has finally been completed. The 28-year-old killer, who was serving two consecutive life sentences in a Massachusetts prison, is dead, apparently by his own hand, the Boston Globereported today.

Luke was pronounced dead at a hospital Monday afternoon after being on life-support since Saturday, when he was discovered unresponsive in his cell. “We suspect it’s another suicide attempt by Luke,” Massachusetts Department of Correction spokesman Darren Duarte told the Globe.

Luke, who had a history of mental illness, showed up at his first court appearance with a swastika carved into his forehead. He had used a jailhouse razor to cut the bloody symbol into his own flesh, officials said.

He was convicted last May of murdering a man and a woman and raping and critically wounding another woman in Brockton, Mass., the day after Obama was inaugurated, becoming the nation’s first black president. Luke’s victims were immigrants from the West African archipelago Cape Verde.

Luke, who was 22 during the spree, told investigators that he decided to kill blacks, Latinos and Jews after reading about “the demise of the white race” on the white supremacist website, Podblanc. He also told them that had he not been arrested, he planned to go on that same day to kill as many Jews as possible at a local synagogue’s bingo night. ( continue to full post… )

A copy of Mein Kampf, three boxes of ammunition, a red t-shirt with a swastika symbol and a file folder titled, “Going underground and declaring war against the government.”

Then add a list of kosher places to eat, a racist, anti-Semitic periodical called The Aryan Alternative and a computer printout about a singing contest to be held at a Jewish community center that is sure to attract hundreds of teenagers.

FBI agents, armed with a search warrant, retrieved these items and several others from the rural Missouri home of Frazier Glenn Miller, a few hours after the 73-year-old neo-Nazi was arrested for allegedly gunning down three people at two Jewish facilities in suburban Kansas City on Sunday, April 13.

Miller being apprehended (KCTV 5 News)

The warrant was issued at 7:05 PM in Lawrence County, Mo., about six hours after the killing began at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City in suburban Overland Park, Kan. The center is some 190 miles from Miller’s home, a “single family dwelling with gray siding and green shingles,” according to the warrant.

Agents went looking for “any evidence of the crime to include but not limited to…”

The agents were also looking for any maps and directions to the Village Shalom Retirement Center, which was the second Jewish facility attacked that April afternoon.

They found much of what they were looking for.

Miller, who is also known as Frazier Glenn Cross, allegedly began his killing spree around 1 PM at the Jewish Community Center. It was packed with hundreds of young hopefuls, trying out for the singing contest, details of which agents found in Miller’s home.

One of the aspiring singers was 14-year-old Reat Griffin Underwood, who was accompanied to the audition by his grandfather, Dr. William Corporon, 69.

Miller, prosecutors charge, shot them to death in the center’s parking lot before they had a chance to even get inside the building.

The former Klan leader turned neo-Nazi then allegedly shot and killed Terri LaManno, 53, who was visiting her mother at the nearby Village Shalom Retirement Center.

Miller is being held on $10 million bond.

After surrendering without a fight, Miller was placed in the back of a police car where he shouted through the wire mesh, “Heil Hitler.”

A neo-Nazi skinhead and his wife stood side-by-side, smiling at each other and wearing his-and-her handcuffs, as they pleaded guilty today in a South Carolina courtroom to murdering a stranger and his wife because they found his name on a list of registered sex offenders.

Jeremy and Christine Moody, the South Carolina representatives of a racist skinhead gang called Crew 41, were arrested last summer shortly after Charles Parker, 59, and his wife, Gretchen, 51, were found shot and stabbed to death in their home on July 21 in the town of Jonesville in Union County, SC.

The Moodys also pleaded guilty to kidnapping, first-degree burglary and possession of a weapon during a violent crime.

They each received a sentence of life in prison.

Christine and Jeremy Moody

Jeremy Moody, who is 30, confessed early and often to authorities that he killed Parker because Parker was a convicted sex offender. Moody said when he was arrested that it was his intention to rid the world of sex offenders and pedophiles. When he was arrested at his parent’s home, The Statereported, investigators found that Moody had written down the name of another sex offender he apparently planned to murder.

As for why Parker’s wife was killed, Moody told investigators at the time that she was simply “a casualty of war.”

Union County Sheriff David Taylor told Hatewatch last summer that Moody’s 36-year-old wife Christine was much more tight-lipped in the beginning of the investigation. But she quickly grew jealous at the media attention her husband was receiving and she too began to boast.

Taylor said Christine bragged about cutting Gretchen Parker’s throat. “She wants to get the glory,” the sheriff said. “She’s cold as hell.”

It appears not much has changed since she was locked up. When asked by the judge today if she had received any promises if she pleaded guilty, Christine grinned and replied, according to The State, “just fame and fortune.”

Before that bloody weekend last July hardly anyone had heard of Crew 41, also known as Die Auserwahlten – “the chosen few.” The crew had small chapters in several states, including South Carolina, where the Moodys appear to have been the only members. They had been trying to recruit more members on social media at the time of their arrest.

Johnathan “Monster” Schmidt, a heavily tattooed California transplant living in small-town Nebraska, founded the crew six months earlier. The same weekend the Parkers were killed, Schmidt was arrested and charged with the brutal assault of a man during a street fight in a Nebraska college town.

“I am out on bail facing 50 years in prison,” Schmidt wrote on VK, a Russian version of Facebook. “And our South Carolina chapter has been picked up on murder charges. Having a hard first years but hopefully things turn around for us.”

On his Facebook page, Schmidt added, “Though I can’t blame them for their actions, this in no way was ordered.” ( continue to full post… )

Cold-case homicide investigators from North Carolina will travel to Kansas City in the hopes of interviewing accused triple murderer Frazier Glenn Miller about an earlier triple homicide and arson at a Shelby, N.C., adult bookstore.

Miller, 73, also known as Frazier Glenn Cross, was arrested April 13 and is charged with three hate-crime murders outside two Jewish centers in Overland Park, Kan.

The news site Raw Story reported last week that “Miller should have been considered the prime suspect in” the Jan. 17, 1987, robbery-murders at the Shelby III Adult Bookstore.

Just two months after that unsolved crime, Miller went “underground” for 44 days to avoid arrest on a criminal contempt citation that came after the Southern Poverty Law Center successfully sued him for operating an illegal paramilitary organization and intimidating African Americans.

The tiny community of Shelby, about 30 miles from Charlotte, is of significance to Miller, he wrote in his autobiography, because it’s where his neo-Nazi, paramilitary White Patriots Party staged its first large rally in April 1985. At the time, Miller wrote, he lived about 200 miles away in Angier, N.C.

At this point, the only known link between Miller and the unsolved homicides in Shelby is his role as a prosecution witness in a 1989 trial against former White Patriots Party follower, Douglas Sheets.

Miller’s testimony in that state murder trial came one year after he was a prosecution witnesses in the Justice Department’s failed attempt to convict 14 other white supremacists in Fort Smith, Ark., of plotting the overthrow of the U.S. government. Miller entered the federal Witness Protection Program after testifying in that case and was given the name Frazier Glenn Cross. He moved to Iowa and became a truck driver.

After the month-long jury trial in North Carolina in 1989, that included Miller’s testimony, Sheets was acquitted of involvement in the murders at the business that attracted a gay and bisexual clientele, Sheet’s defense attorney Leslie A. Farfour told Hatewatch today.

“The only way I think he [Miller] will be linked to these unsolved murders is if he confesses,” Farfour told Hatewatch. ( continue to full post… )

Here at Hatewatch, we’re taking a deeper look at the donors who keep the largest hate site on the Internet – Stormfront – up and running. Taking in more than $100,000 a year in contributions, Stormfront is one of the best-funded hate sites in the world.

Although the site has hundreds of “Sustaining Members” that pledge $50 a year, a detailed financial study by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) shows that usually less than a dozen donors provide more than half of the income Stormfront takes in each month.

In fact, only a handful of high value contributors cover most of the costs involved in keeping Don Black, owner of Stormfront, and his vision of “White Pride Worldwide” online.

Philip Holthoff on the Star City High School website

This month, Philip Holthoff, an odd and intensely racist Arkansas high school social studies teacher was among them, pledging $100 on April 20th. He is also a sustaining member. Holthoff’s donation came just days after a Southern Poverty Law Center report identified Stormfront as the primary online meeting place for murderers involved in white supremacist-related killings worldwide.

Holthoff, 53, a teacher at Star City High School in Star City, Ark., about 60 miles south of Little Rock, is another neo-Nazi in a position of trust, hidden in plain sight. On his Facebook page, he links to various hate groups, including American Renaissance, The Occidental Quarterly and Alternative Right, along with the Star City High School Art Department.

It is on Stormfront, in more than 400 posts over the past ten years, where Holthoff has made clear his opinion of the African-American students he is entrusted to educate. Posting under the anonymous user name, “David_Lee_Saxon,” Holthoff has been unflinchingly open about his professional position. “I teach high school and you would be amazed at some of the wild rumors Negro students believe,” Holthoff wrote in 2008.

In a 2009 post in the Stormfront Youth section, in a thread titled “Aren’t Teachers Supposed to Teach truth?” Holthoff wrote: “I teach social studies in a public high school and I am racially conscious!”

In another forum thread he started in 2009 titled “Reflections from a racially conscious high school teacher,” the Arkansas teacher wrote, “You don’t know chaos until you have seen Negro students going wild in the halls after the [2008] election screaming: OBAMA…OBAMA!!!”

Mike Walker, the principal at Star City High School, told Hatewatch he had “no clue” about Holthoff’s racist activities. Dr. Richard Montgomery, the school district’s superintendent, told Hatewatch, “The school district does not advocate hating anyone.” For his part, Holthoff told Hatewatch, after being advised that his racist postings would be reported on, “That’s fine. Go for it.” He added, “I’m not talking to you. I have nothing to say.”

In his writings, rife with spelling and punctuation errors, Holthoff has repeatedly expressed his opinion on interracial dating in his high school. “In every high school there are white girls willing to have sex with black males. I have seen it change from “‘Thats [sic] is so gross, I would never do that .’ [sic] to ‘Well, I personally wouldn’t do it, but if they are in love who are we to interfere?” He continues, “What is changing now is that even ‘nice’ girls from ‘good’ families are having interracial relationships. its not just ‘poor white trash’ girls anymore. I know of cases in which they go to the prom together and the white parent does not have a problem with it!”

In the aftermath of the fatal shooting of three people at two Jewish community centers last weekend, one voice has been absent on the online racist message board Vanguard News Forum (VNN), where the alleged killer was most active – its loquacious founder.

Neo-Nazi Alex Linder has earned himself quite the reputation as the foul-mouthed operator of VNN. But in the aftermath of Sunday’s killing rampage in Kansas, believed to have been committed by his friend and confidant Frazier Glenn Miller (aka Frazier Glenn Cross), Linder – who rarely lets a day pass without posting some racist screed – was stone silent.

It was a rare moment that led to wild speculation. Some of his fellow racists wondered if Linder was paralyzed with shock, while others thought he was keeping quiet under legal advice, or even cooperating with federal investigators putting together the details and motives of Miller’s decision to walk into the Jewish Community Center and a Jewish retirement home in Overland Park, Kan., and open fire.

In his first posts after breaking his silence, Linder gave no weight to any of those ideas. He claimed to have been quiet about the shootings because his cable went out for days, then cautioned other white nationalists to be careful what they post on VNN, as people would be watching as they dug through Miller’s colossal presence on the site. After all, Miller has been one of Linder’s closest confidants for years and worked as a national distributor for Linder’s “The Aryan Alternative,” VNN’s caustic, racist newsletter.

Linder contorted himself to protect Miller, who went by “Rounder” on VNN and posted thousands of racist messages over the years as a “senior member.” In Linder’s callous assessment of the tragedy, Cross had just had too much to drink, and just maybe, he suggested, the Jews – whom he labeled “swarthy, hairy, bow-legged, beady-eyed, parasitic midgets” – had it coming.

“It appears to me that Rounder acted on the spur of the moment. When you’re drunk, your inhibitions drop,” Linder wrote. But that wasn’t enough. There had to be someone, or something, responsible for what Cross did that day. It wasn’t Linder, and it certainly wasn’t VNN. “Who’s to blame here?” Linder asked. “Jews. Alone.”

“I’m afraid jews [sic] must take responsibility for Rounder’s completely logical and completely justified hatred of them, too, for they murdered tens of millions of our folk last century, and are now embarked on a global campaign to bring about white genocide,” Linder wrote in another post that is one of many since he broke his silence. “When you do that, well, you have to expect a little blowback.”

Blowback? That “blowback” was the death of three innocent people, identified as Reat Griffin Underwood, 14, and the boy’s grandfather, William Lewis Corporon, 69, both killed at the community center. The third victim, killed at the retirement center, was Terri LaManno, a 53-year-old occupational therapist visiting her mother.

Miller is not the first VNN user to resort to violence. And a two-year study just released by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that users of another racist forum, Stormfront, have murdered nearly 100 people in the last five years. One of those users was Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011, most of whom were teenagers at a summer camp.

But even for that that, Linder had praise. To a fellow commenter, he boldly wrote, “You don’t like [Breivik] because he erased a bunch of commie punks, and you used to be one. But I hate commie punks, and I have suffered in school from precisely the type he shot, and so I supported him.”

Before the fist fight and the knife and the spilled blood, a bare chested neo-Nazi with a large swastika tattooed on his stomach was belting out white power songs on a karaoke machine late Sunday night in a Southern California bar.

In the middle of the music and the mayhem, according to the Riverside County Sheriff’s department, was the familiar and distinctive face – to say the least – of Johnathan “Monster” Schmidt, the heavily tattooed neo-Nazi founder of the racist skinhead gang known as Crew 41.

By the end of the night in Lake Elsinore, Schmidt, 29, was probably singing a much different tune: the blues. Once again he was in handcuffs and in serious trouble with the law – arrested and booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon.

Just three months ago, Schmidt faced up to 50 years in prison if convicted of a brutal assault in Nebraska last summer that left a man bleeding in the street of a small college town, his skull fractured. Schmidt, who is covered in tattoos from the top of his shaven head to his face to his stomach inked with a large swastika, was picked out of a photo lineup as the attacker.

Schmidt admitted to punching the man after being “provoked,” but insisted someone else kicked the man in the head. Schmidt said he was the victim of mistaken identity. After deliberating for seven hours over two days, a jury acquitted him of all charges.

At the time of the assault last July, Schmidt was living in Nebraska where six months earlier he started, largely on the Internet, Crew 41, also known as Die Auserwahlten – “the chosen few.”

The crew has chapters in several states. Two members of the crew’s South Carolina chapter – a man and wife – were arrested and charged with double homicide around the same time Schmidt was being arrested for assault in Nebraska.

After his acquittal, Schmidt packed his bags and moved his young family back to his native Southern California, vowing on social media to stay out of trouble for the sake of his beloved newborn daughter.